I always think about Christine Jorgensen, who was the first American to be widely known as having a sex reassignment surgery in 1952. She went to Europe to have the surgery and sent letters back home to inform her friends and family about the change. The letters she sent to her parents were leaked to the press and it was front page news by the time she returned home.
At the beginning, the press and public at large was fascinated. It was a weird story that people had no experience with, and they were mostly fine with accepting it as confusing but interesting. Over time, however, people learned to hate it and started to be more critical of the concept. It’s from before my time, so I’m not really sure of how it was received, but the impression I get is that most people weren’t bothered by it until somebody told them to be bothered by it. And that’s ultimately what seems to happen with children.
If you tell them that somebody is different, they find it amusing and then move on. But if you also tell them that it’s wrong and that they should hate that person for being different, they’ll hate them as well. The hate itself is what’s unnatural. Young kids encountering something new and confusing is entirely natural. When you’re young, everything is new and confusing.
But what people mean when they say “my kids won’t understand” or they’ll “be confused” is actually “seeing gay people could make my kid realize they’re gay” or “they won’t understand why being gay is wrong”
what’s with all the geometry haters recently? geometry is cool…
I struggled like hell with a lot of geometry. Algebra, trig, etc. was no problem at all for me. I suspect it has something to do with me not being a visual learner/thinker (and I have aphantasia), but I don’t know.
i think that’s fair. it also seems like geometry isn’t taught in the most helpful way in schools, with too much emphasis on memorizing formulas and not enough emphasis on just playing around and seeing what happens. a lot of the geometric formulas come from pretty creative ideas like “what if i cut up this shape in a few different ways and try to piece it back together in a new way”, and that’s not really reflected in most curriculums (in my experience anyway).
and there’s also a pretty deep connection between geometry and algebra, but that doesn’t really get properly mentioned until way later.
i think at the end of the day, in my experience, the problem might be that geometry is just pretty hard in general. most of the time geometric problems get solved by translating them into non-geometric problems and then solving those problems instead. but that practice isn’t very well respected in the way it’s taught. that being said, i still think that playing around with shapes can be kind of cool.
I think it’s just used as a striking visual example of these things we all learned in school which we have used 0 times in real life.
speak for yourself but i have used geometry countless times in my daily life as a mathematician
And yet you still can’t cast a basic level 1 spell.
i still don’t even know the order of the alphabet by heart. casting spells is the least of my worries.
If anyone ever needs to be taught how important love is, introduce them to the "twin flames’ cult.
It’s a cult based solely on the cult leaders seem to have a functional relationship despite being two of the most unlikable people imaginable.
I mean, they’re actually worried that the kids won’t understand their learned disgust response.
Definitely. Teaching children to feel disgust for things that don’t affect you or them is really hard. Somehow racists have this down to an art. Maybe it’s all the literature.
Hating The Gays is mostly backed by The Bible which is a such a horrible piece of literature, that getting even a basic grasp on its concepts requires weekly discussions lead by someone who devotes their life to its study and even some of them haven’t read the whole thing.
My parents taught me that if I didn’t want to see something that someone was doing I need to look elsewhere. It ain’t my business.
They’re both religious, but they have talked shit about the bigotry in their church for as long as I can remember. They never understood why I abandoned religion. However, Mom did eventually tell me “As long as you’re a good person I’m not going to press you on it. At least you didn’t turn out to be a jackass like <name of their assistant pastor who I grew up in church with>.”
I wish more people viewed their religion like that instead of viewing it like that jackass.
I have long been of the opinion that after the printing press came into vogue the Bible was intentionally made illegible.
It’s written so fucking poorly it has to be intentional, you literally couldn’t fuck it up that badly on accident.
It’s not that it was written poorly, so much as it was written in and for a Bronze Age culture that no longer exists.
The modern audience isn’t reading it with the cultural context in which was written, and without that context it’s as you say, awful.
A lot of the imagery is just allegory- especially in the prophetic bits. The vast majority of human history was written in a time where saying “[that asshole ruler] is an asshole” wouldn’t get you killed, or saying “[that jackass of a priest] is batshit crazy!” Would get you tortured and then killed.
So they use allegory and symbolism to say it, and any one who was meant to be the audience would understand that. The book of revelation, for example, was in part about Nero (the antichrist,) (it should be noted revelation was probably written by John of Patmos, on the island of Patmos. Which is famous for always having… how shall we say it… “interesting” mushrooms?)
Yeah they’re not the best teachers.
Edit: also, are evil and literally want to kill me, but thats a personal nitpick.
Absolutely. If you tell kids that these two dudes hold hands because they love each other, their natural response is something like “ok”, and that’s it.
Unless they’re in the why phase, but honestly I’d be just as uncomfortable explaining them why leaves are shaped like they are.
In my experience it’s also a fear of their child learning that sex can be just for pleasure as well as something more utilitarian and ‘responsible’ like making babies. My experience is predominantly with religious people though. Other bigots may vary.
Religious people (esp conservative Christians) have worked themselves into a mental knot where they’re trying to deny their own instincts and curiosity. Be that the porn they feel guilty over or whether they’re actually sexually compatible with their partner they married quite quickly some 30 years ago. So sex can’t primarily be for pleasure (because this denial helps them protect themselves from their own shame). It’s has to be part of god’s purpose, it has to be part of physically making the next generation.
Gay couples upend this delusion. To put compatibility and attraction and relationship above the ‘duty’ of having a pregnancy? Gay couples show that’s perfectly fine. And sex is fun and beautiful.
When your go-to is to scare your curious kids about sex (the sex you as a joyless 30-40 something can’t have), then “getting someone pregnant” is the ever useful bogeyman. But gay couples are immune to this.
I think it’s why conservative religious people end up hating with such vitriol. They hate gayness. Probably are disgusted on some learned level. But also hate it because they want it. They want sexual freedom. Sexual curiosity. Joy without duty. Their mind and body are screaming at them “Why not?” But the religious mind refuses to acknowledge the emperor has no clothes (ha). If they do their whole world (and marriage and social standing) comes crashing down.
So perish the thought their kids discover safe consensual sex is fun. That undoes everything.
This is a really great insight but I think there’s even more depth here. Highly religious Christians can be in a very happy and loving relationship (having a lot of sex and producing a large family) and still have these views about gay and lesbian couples.
I think what it ultimately comes down to is that religion is the foundation of their life. All of their friends and family are religious. They all participate by going to regular Sunday services at church and also attending church-run social events too. Their whole life is wrapped up in religion and all of their shared beliefs are a packaged deal (picking and choosing is not acceptable).
So when their religion tells them an alternative lifestyle is wrong (and we’re not just talking gay couples here, but also having sex outside of marriage) they have to accept that belief even if they feel differently. Why? Because challenging that belief means rejecting all of their friends and family, their church community, and walking off into the unknown, completely alone. For many people this is impossible! And even people who do manage it have a very difficult road ahead of them, and many don’t make it. I recall a local window and door maker who took his own life years after having walked away from his church and community.
I, personally, grew up in a religious Catholic family. We went to church every Sunday and afterwards to my grandparents’ house for brunch (they lived right beside the church). We all loved my grandmother dearly; she put so much effort into creating this beautiful spread on her big dining room table. We celebrated many Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter dinners together as well!
Everything began to change when my grandparents left and moved to a retirement home. Since then they passed away and we as a family see each other less and less. I personally am no longer religious and I know the same is true for many of my cousins. I consider myself lucky that this process happened to all of us at once. But I still miss the closeness and celebrations we shared as a family back then. I wouldn’t wish this profound loss on anyone.
Yes this is all true too. I’ve seen it all first hand, including the power (and wholesomeness) of deep family bonds built around church. Even more so when it’s a whole community where you feel like you become family. I think religious groups are one of the few social structures that actually recreate the homogeneous “clans” that our evolved bodies and minds crave, because for so much history they meant safety and flourishing.
Going against the group is a kind of ‘suicide’. Not just socially but as a learned instinct of a very real consequence - just like you said. Going against your clan almost certainly means being isolated and cut off and on a deep level we’re terrified of that.
The Trump administration will resolve this by ending teaching of geometry.
I cant wait for the country to be filled with people who can’t read again.
To be fair, geometry is way easier than understanding your weird human emotions, like this “love” you speak of.
Removed by mod
Takes one to know one.
Removed by mod
To be fair, I’m still not sure I understand geometry.
I “learned” it in school and promptly never needed to even know if it’s existence ever again.
At best, my understanding of geometry is rusty. At worst, it might as well not exist.
Something I learned about schools, as a perfectionist and someone who studies independently when something is interesting, is that, educational institutions are not always correct in what they’re teaching. My experience also demonstrates that they don’t want to be correct. They want you to provide the answers they’ve given you, not the correct answers. If you tell them that the answers they’re giving you are wrong, even with evidence that’s scholastically acceptable, they refuse to do anything.
School isn’t there to teach you anything, it’s to test if you can follow along and memorize what they think is important, then regurgitate that information back. IMO, this is why having post-secondary education is important in most fields. It demonstrates a willingness to do as you’re told sufficiently enough to complete something. The subject matter that you “learned” is mostly irrelevant.
Additionally, highschool curriculums are utter bullshit. The vast majority of what you learn you will never use. Instead of teaching real life skills, like how to vote (and/or register to vote), do your taxes, and seek help from financial aid organizations or similar… How to get information and submit information to/from institutions like city Hall… The list is long… They instead teach bullshit like the Pythagoras theorem, chemical nomenclature, biology… The list is still very long. A lot of shit you’ll never use unless you’re an engineer, architect, mechanic or other related discipline, almost all of which need higher education to get into.
But everyone needs to learn that bullshit for no good goddamned reason, while stuff we all should know, is completely overlooked.
Institutional education is broken and bullshit.
When I was a kid I saw Birdo in the Super Mario Bros 2 manual and the bit about how she thinks she’s a girl.
And I was like “Oh, interesting”.
When I was a kid, I had no idea how many mysteries would this universe hold. A new one? Guess I learned something new that day.
Most people saying stuff like that probably dont even know what geometry is so this argument kinda breaks down /s
Yeah when I was in high school I honestly didn’t understand how to shove anything down my throat.
Everyone be worked up at the wrong organized religion. The Cult of Pythagoras is the real sleeper threat.
